There are tens of thousands of API’s available. More to come. Most of the companies though, have troubles engaging developers to use them. So I have decided to share a few thoughts and ideas on how you can do that, based on my experience.

Design your API well

Nobody likes powerful, but not developer-friendly APIs. Follow the “standards” in the area, but innovate a bit to make us (developers) happy and eager to learn more. I will not spend more time here, because I guess you are already building your API if you need the information below. If you are looking for more info on that subject, click here to read an excellent article.

Document your API

If you want other people to use it – document it well. Add examples for the most popular programming languages. Copy/ Paste/ Run is the first step to a great journey.

Do not forget the not-so-trending programming languages at the moment. Target people who explore them – they are the right group to start with.

Eat your own dog-food

Ask your internal developers to use the API. Get the feedback from them and make it better. I am not talking about the developers who wrote the API, they must use it of course. Try to engage other teams within the company (if you have any) to use the API.

Organize an internal Friday APIJam. Sit together in a room for a few hours and do something useful using the technologies you work with – don’t push them to learn new language or technique – just use the API focusing on the value.

Come up with nice awards for the most active participants, get some sweets and drinks (even beer) as well. Then ask the participants to present their work at the end and listen to their feedback.

Hack your API

Organize hackatons with external groups or jump into such organized by someone else – ask developers to hack the API and to create a small app that will serve theirs needs – then promote the effort and make those developers rockstars by using your PR channels.

The goal is not to test your API (as you do during the internal APIJam event), but to show the value that your API brings to the world. The Call for Action should be something like “use our API to build your own App”.

Create more initiatives like that. Repeat();

Connect

Get in touch with the local developer groups and go the their next meeting with some pizza and beer. Show them your data, ask for their feedback, show them your API, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Then create a fair process to work with communities around you – what you want from them and what’s in for them.

Discuss

Push the discussion around your API and manage it. Respond to comments immediately, ask for feedback and show how it is implemented. Post your API to reddit, Dzone and other similar sites and get real, honest feedback (together with some trolls, that’s inevitable)

Equilibrium

Treat your community members equally. Sometimes a new member can have a kick-butt idea and if you ignore him/her this can have negative impact overall. Focus on the value!

Partner up

Find partners to help you to get traction. Why don’t you contact your local startup accelerators and do something together to include your awesome API as an requirement for the next call? Does it work? Oh yeah!

Explore

Constantly explore new ways and hacks on how to engage the community, but remember – this must be a fair deal – every part should be happy and equally satisfied. This is your way towards an engaged community.

I have been interviewed by Loyd Waldo from StartupYard – a great Czech startup accelerator. You can find the interview here and you can discover some things that I am sharing for the fist time with a larger audience.

No kidding. Prague became one of the finest European technology and start-up hubs and I believe there is a great future and potential, which we will see coming true in the next couple of years.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I moved here a couple of years ago. If you add the beauty of Prague and the fine quality of the Czech beer, you will not be surprised that I want to invite you to an unique event.

[note]This is one of the few places in the world where developers, designers, product managers, marketing ninjas, big data nerds, content management racoons, hackers and even normal people can sit together and discuss a lot of things together and even to start something..[/note]

I know, you will say that you have such events in your country, but this is international, have a look at the speakers and do not forget the beer and the city.

Trusted companies and awesome startups are happy to be here and to turn their dreams into reality and most important, into profit.
[highlight]13 different subjects, many speakers, 3 days of fun and beer + something you can take home with you – knowledge and inspiration. That’s priceless.[/highlight]

Join the event:

$you->is_geek(): apply

We are looking for ambassadors in every European country. Prime directive – to spread a word about the event and to become a super geek star. In exchange we will give you free entrance and will make you famous – this is a long time deal.

Couple of months ago I started a little “via Twitter” only campaign and now I think it’s the time to give it more visibility, because the deadline is in 20 days.

What?

The main idea is: for every tweet [tooltip title=”Yes I Will” gravity=”e”][mark color=”yellow”]I will run 1[/mark][/tooltip] meter on Prague Marathon on September 8th 2012 (yes in 20 days) and will donate some money to an open source project.

Maybe some of you know, maybe not, but I am part of a great company now called Glogster EDU. The reason I joined was I will have the opportunity to change how the education system works and to try to implement THE WEB into every school in the World. How awesome is that?

Those who knows me well, probably know the fact that I am a bad-ass person and I don’t like stupid rules and any form of Autocracy (One of the reason I am not active in the Mozilla Project anymore) and now I will have the opportunity to teach people how to remix the web and how to be part of a Great teaching community. (We have more than 3 000 000 community members so far. )

ConferenceGeekOut is a great possibility to meet the luminaries of the Java community right in Tallinn, Estonia. You can listen to great talks and network with your peers. We inviterock starspeakers from all over the world to introduce you to the latest and greatest aspects of Java technology. And we make sure, as it was in 2011, that each and every talk focuses on technology and technology only.

Event triggering

You may need to install xdotool using your package manager. This tool allows you to emulate keyboard action in different combinations, but I will need to emulate pressing the right arrow key.

How it works:

When web-cam detects movement an event emulating ‘right arrow’ key is pressed. Since I am using HTML5 DZslides from here, this allows me to move to next slide only with moving my hand in front of my webcam.

Run

Run it and move your hand in front of your camera. You may want to turn on the logging to see the motion detection and the event detection if it’s not working at first.

A friend of mine just show me a info about my efforts to establish Pirate Party in Bulgaria published on Wikileaks:

(SBU) A Bulgarian Green Party leader and two other Bulgarian
activists have started a petition to establish a Bulgarian “Pirate
Party” which advocates for free downloading of copyrighted materials
among other things. Under Bulgarian law, 5,000 signatures are
required for a political party to be formally established. Given
the fact that Bulgaria’s Green Party has generally attracted less
than one percent of the vote in national and EU elections, it is
unlikely that the fledgling Pirate Party would surpass the four
percent voting threshold needed to win a seat in Parliament.
Nonetheless, if this new party begins to win support from the
general public, IPR enforcement and legislation could face political
obstacles in Parliament in the future.

Since we launched free version of JRebel for non-commercial products called JRebel Social I was curios how fast I can install it on my Fedora 15. I thought it will be a hard task, but I was surprised how easy I done it.

What is JRebel?

0. Let’s install Eclipse HELIOS first via yum.

#yum install eclipse

Note: It does install and JDK also, so you don’t have to be worried about that anymore :)

1. Install the Eclipse Market place

Eclipse market place is not installed by default on Fedora’s version so you will need to do that.
1. Click on Help >> Install new software
2. Choose “All available sites” and write “marketplace” like shown here:

3. Install it

2. Install JRebel

Click on Help >> Eclipse Marketplace and choose/ search for JRebel and click on install:

Select all of these, if you are not sure what to do or read more about them here:

I am writing here about OpenWeb, FOSS Community management, hacking, Javascript, PHP and different interesting stuff and if you subscribe to my RSS feed (click here to do that) and if you send me your address (click here to send it to me via secure form) I promise I will send you a nice postcard using snail mail or I can buy you a beer if we meet somewhere.